I can take you or leave you. Made peace with my genes being extinguished. Dying alone. Living at fifty, sixty in this same – I was going to say squalid apartment but there are flowers in the park. Good neighbors. Redtails, goshawks, owls, a kestrel. Many hummingbirds. Woodpeckers thrushes robins blue jays; mockingbirds, of course, but also still song sparrows. An unkindness of ravens who have words. Butterflies, gophers, fat underage Mexican teen cunt cracks in yoga pants. All this when merely the clouds would be enough.
I’ll never get married. Never have children. I’ll suffer and die alone and I’ve made peace with this so go fuck yourself with it’s over between us. You emotional terrorist. It’s over between me and the fucking planet. I love you baby but don’t push me. What holds people together anymore. All I can do is tell you take a fucking walk. I’ll fuck a hummingbird.
Art Review: Self-Portrait (Performance with Object) by Emma Sulkowicz
She thought you were hot, my date told me. Well shit. Could I pull it off. I’ve beat off to her rape video 15 times. You stand on a plywood box; she stands across from you on another plywood box; there’s a painted line between you and you talk but you’re not allowed to touch her. Close by there’s a mannequin of her called Emmatron hooked up to an iPad with canned questions. If you ask about the rape she directs you to the mannequin. The iPad says why didn’t you go to the cops right away. Why did you Facebook message him: fuck me in the butt, and so forth. You pick one. Her recorded voice comes on. Fuck me in the butt is an expression like shoot me in the head. If I told you shoot me in the head, would you literally think I want to be shot in the head.
My date blew it with her. I couldn’t hear but you could tell Emma couldn’t stand her. I’m glad she went first. I had a plan for what I’d say. Bunch of banal shit then one real question.
Yes she does get tired. But she’s able to sit down. The show’s gotta be very different at 7PM the last day than now, I told her, trying to sound cool. At some point you must start thinking: oh, blow it out your ass. That’s why I made Emmatron, she said.
Yes people cry like with Marina Abramovic. People come up and look in her eyes and cry and also, a lot of people want to talk about their own rape. Just to tell somebody. It got to where she had to hand it off to Emmatron. Well your work is so much about people’s baggage, I said.
You ought to take this on tour, I told her. Colleges have money. Five grand a night and seems like they’d be into this type of shit. Maybe but I can’t spend my whole life doing this, she said. I said something about her in in an RV on tour, out in the Nebraska cornfields with the fuckin robot in the passenger seat. She didn’t quite laugh. But I got that feeling of making a girl laugh.
Have you been accused of rape, my date asked in the car. She reads the manosphere. Well no but the day is young. Really, I said, I’ve never raped anybody. I’m the world’s horniest man and I’ve been in bed with blackout drunk hot naked teens, drunk and on speed myself. I know I couldn’t do it. But then sometimes you don’t know. I keep thinking about one girl I fucked off OKCupid in 2014. When I looked down she was crying.
At lunch she asked why don’t you apply to the Iowa Writers Workshop. This girl found me when someone emailed her one of my OKCupid stories. Why don’t you submit that to Paris Review. I don’t want to be in Paris Review, I said. I want young girls to think I should be in Paris Review. And it’s working.
Really it hadn’t occurred to me. I think my work is shit. Later I looked at Paris Review. The first story is by Chris Batchelder. I remember a plaque with that name at my prep school. Flint Batchelder, captain of the 1902 lacrosse team or something. Now his descendants are in Paris Review. My father was a pipefitter. He did jail time for stealing tires in Alabama. I was at that school on scholarship, to get bootstrapped out of 10,000 years of pregnant teen alcoholics. I had impostor syndrome. And rightly so. Look at me now. My writing is bad and I’m bad and Paris Review would laugh at me. I literally want to be shot in the head.
Paris Review can suck my balls, I told her. More people read my shit than Paris Review. That night I took an at risk teen to a Clippers game. The Staples center is so big it gave me vertigo. Twice as many people as can fit in the Staples Center have read my story about an artificial pussy, which is in some ways amateurish but also ought to be etched into titanium and launched into space for aliens to find. But then that was 2013. What have I done for me lately. Can’t write good shit because now I have to work. I could barely do it unemployed.
Chris Batchelder does not have this problem. Emma Sulkowicz does not have this problem. Like Cat Marnell she’s the daughter of two rich New York psychiatrists. But also she’s brave enough to sleep in a garage. And look, I don’t know if she got raped or not. If it went down like the video then yes. That’s why it’s so hot. Even with the Shaw Brothers sound effect when he hits her.
Do you read all the shit about you on the internet, I asked. At this point is it white noise to you. Or can it ever sting. Well I do and the answer is yes, she said. She was telling the truth. I also put this one in Emmatron, she said.
I tried not to think: I’d like to put one in Emmatron. But I’m a robot.
I got the girl home and got a finger in her jeans. Her pussy was hard to navigate. I’m 40 and I still need the beginner model. Please stop, she said. I don’t want to sleep with you. It felt good to be surprised.
In conclusion: four stars.
Bud
I was with a girl, this was maybe 2007. We went to the county shelter in Burbank to get a cat. A young male because my last cat was cool. The cat room there is a long row of tanks with plexiglass in front, air holes. 30 cats but no young guys until the very last cat in the very last row. Black and fluffy with a white star on his chest. Who’s this handsome fellow. He’s one of the bucket cats, the woman said. Two kittens found in a sealed paint bucket. The sister adopted already. This guy was aging out of “cute kitten,” maybe headed for the firing squad.
I put my finger on the glass and said: hey, bud. He put his paw on my finger. On the way out the clerk with the paperwork said do you know his name, and I said: Bud.
I got a call at work. Someone at the neighbor’s left the gate open; the pit bull got out. Neighbor took him to the vet. They thought he might make it. He didn’t.
Nine years it was you and me. Now you’re gone and without you I’m gone too. I can’t move your food bowl. I hear you outside wanting to come in, get brushed, sit next to me on the piano bench while I look at stupid shit on the internet, you groom yourself. That was what we did most nights. You just sitting with me. Just being with each other.
We’d go out in the park in the morning. I’d sit and write and you’d rub against my legs and stalk things in the grass. Puff up when a dog was coming but stand your ground. You knew I’d protect you. I’d walk back toward home and you’d wait for me to get twenty feet and then run after me, try to catch my legs.